


Alternate Takes

by She_sees_in_the_dark



Series: Son, Father, Family [2]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997), Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Genre: BAMF Veld, BAMF Vincent Valentine, The Lifestream (Compilation of FFVII), Things that didn't quite work, Turk Vincent Valentine, Wolves, more to come - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:27:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24869098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/She_sees_in_the_dark/pseuds/She_sees_in_the_dark
Summary: Nothing too exciting here-- this is just alternate scenes of scenes already released in my work "Son". They'll come up as they come up. Please don't judge them too much-- they were rejected for a reason. Scenes that didn't fit or just didn't have a spot will get released somewhere else.
Series: Son, Father, Family [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1799446
Comments: 28
Kudos: 119





	1. Wolves in the Manor

**Author's Note:**

> This first one is an alternate scene for Veld to explore the manor, wherin the local wolf population decided to help and Veld got a much earlier hint that things were weirder than he realized. It didn't work, for several reasons. The animals all have... rules, and with the timeline, this would have broken several. They were also far too blatant. But if you liked the wolves, here's a shot of the wolves acting like the not-wolves they usually act like. And Veld really is taking it all too calmly.

The first few floors were barren, lifeless and rather dusty at best. He walked through, seeing nothing out of place, and feeling… helpless.

His partner. His fault. He hadn’t been there—he hadn’t watched his back.

He was on his third trip through the place when a sharp bark drew his attention—a Nibel wolf stood watching him across the floor of the lobby. But… no Nibel wolf he had ever met would wag it’s tail at a human. No Nibel wolf he had ever met had blonde fur in rough spikes, blue eyes. This had to be someone’s… overlarge, but friendly, pet. “Hey boy. What are you doing in here?”

The creature barked and dropped into a play bow, then ran off. Behind him, a female Nibel wolf—smaller, but still far too large to be a normal dog, black with eyes like red wine, frisked with a grey wolf with blue eyes. Veld began to get nervous—halfbreed wolves these might be, but feral animals were often much more dangerous than wild.

The grey wolf had a flower wound into it’s fur. Curious.

Still, each of the creatures made conspicuous displays of friendliness—play bowing and wagging tails, perked ears and little excited yips as he approached. The female approached the first time he offered his hand, looking the other way—she dropped to her belly and crawled forward, licking his hand and accepting scratches readily. The grey wolf approached next—how had a flower grown so entwined in it’s fur?

If anything the big grey male was more friendly than the female—he wanted belly rubs.

A moment later, and the blonde wolf reappeared, with something glinting in it’s mouth. It dropped it to the floor and nosed it to him, as if to urge him to throw it.

A key.

“I don’t think I should throw this.” Veld told the wolf, who only snorted and wagged his tail.

Behind him, the grey male started digging at a wall. That moved, sliding backward to reveal a spiral staircase.

The thing was, you couldn’t be overly superstitious and be a Turk. You couldn’t. Everyone prayed to someone, fine, no atheists in foxholes and their lives were one big, convoluted foxhole. Very, very few of them could stay sane without the notion of **_some_** manner of divine backup. But to believe in ghosts was to believe in being haunted, and believing in that meant accepting that you would **_be_** haunted. No Turk had clean hands. Not for long, anyway. Valentine had managed to maintain a curious sort of innocence—a gentleness and a sensitivity that Veld had often cursed for getting him killed. Veld’s world was cold and hard, and no ghosts lived in it.

But… wolves did not act like this. Dogs did not act like this.

The blond wolf called him back to himself with a hard bark, then looked at the stairs. Growled when he tried to go down the staircase in front of him. “What do you **_want_** , dumb dog?” It shouldered in front of him and walked down the stairs first. There was a snort to his left—the grey wolf looking after his leader with a sort of bland amusement completely out of place on a wolf. It saw him looking and, wagging his tail, bumped him with the crown of his head to urge him forward.

This place wasn’t on any of the schematics. He knew. He had looked.

The female clung tightly to the blonde, who was evidently in charge, though he was slightly smaller than the grey wolf—maybe just due to being less laid back. The grey clung tightly to Veld, almost solicitously, and his head came up under Veld’s hand when he slipped briefly on the stairs, steadying him and letting him catch himself.

“Thanks boy,” he whispered without knowing why. There was no one here to hear him but the wolves, and surely they didn’t mind him speaking normally. He got the softest, quietest woof he had ever heard in reply, and even that had their inhuman leader looking back at them with flattened ears. “Sorry!”

He was apologizing to a dog. Wolf. It didn’t matter, he was talking to a canid like it could understand him. Worse, they were acting like they understood. He took a deep shuddering breath, and let it out.

Vincent was the one who dealt with the woo-woo shit, damnit.

No, that wasn’t fair. Vincent had already dealt with the woo-woo shit. Or perhaps, more accurately, it had dealt with Vincent. Veld could hold it together. Act like it made sense. What he needed were answers, and if he had to step into some crazy shit to get them, well maybe he should have done that eight **_fucking_** years ago.

The grey wolf bumped his hand and rumbled at him—not a growl, but too low and long to be a bark either. Veld scratched between his ears and got a slow wag of the tail in reply.

The female and the blonde male looked at each other, up ahead, then the female darted forward, low to the ground, peering about corners and doorways. Veld would have kept walking after her, but the lead male looked at him and sat very deliberately in front of him. He didn’t look happy either—ears flicking about and one always trained on the direction the female had gone.

A few minutes later the female came back, a little dirtier than before, ears half laid back. The lead male was on his feet before she got there, sniffing her gently before relaxing, then he looked back to Veld, and ran forward again.

Veld sighed and followed.

The first disagreement in the leadership was about what may have once been a doorway—the door had been blown open from the inside and parts of it were scattered across the ground—that made everyone stop dead in their tracks, though the lead pair seemed the most shocked.

The grey wolf sat and started sneezing. It sounded like laughter to Veld, and after a moment the other two joined in, the female more so than her counterpart. But when she started toward the destroyed doorway, the male let out a low, quiet growl, and she paused, one ear perked, one ear sideways.

The male started forward, ignoring the female, and a slight amount of growling filled the air before she huffed and rejoined the pack, ears folded back.

“What’s this about?” Veld asked, trying to peer into the room. Boxes? But the grey wolf bumped him onwards with his head, and he was hip deep in crazy now, so he decided to go along with it.


	2. To Shiva's Pointed Ears

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An alternate scene of Vincent's return to Nibelheim, post mountain, post passing out with Rells' shop, pre waking up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I toyed around with a bunch of scenes with Vincent's (triumphant?) return to Nibelheim, which, like the wolves, I rejected for many reasons. One of which is simply that it seemed too... dramatic. Another, it seemed to look too closely at what was going on-- I don't have medical knowledge, and while I imagine the rules and actions of a healer in Nibelheim aren't going to adhere to our standards for doctors in modern hospitals I didn't want to look too close at that-- better to zoom out a little. Also, Sephiroth. I like the little dark note from Sephiroth (the 'you and what army' bit) but... he wasn't ready. And I think having the scene mostly from his perspective, not Claudia's, added something that's missing here. Although I like Claudia. I need to do more with her. I forgot how much I liked her staring down Sephiroth, even in his mini form. And while the scene with Var or at least something like it might well have happened, I don't think it was quite like this. Towards the end, of course, they are pretty similar. 
> 
> You guys should see the document where I keep the work. It's a mess. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Claudia wasn’t surprised when Var came back into the house at a run at the news, eyes wild and hair… wilder. “Var—”

“He’s alive?”

“And made it back. Wash up—if he’s hurt… I need someone more muscular to help me pick him up and undress him. … We need to know that immediately. Untreated injury on top of everything else would be… bad.”

“But he… is alive?”

Claudia looked at her husband and felt herself smile. “Last I heard at least. Somehow.”

Var stared up at her, he just inside the house, she in the doorway of their sickroom. “Then… then we make sure he stays that way.”

“From your lips, husband, to Shiva’s pointed ears. I’m not surrendering a damn inch.”

“He fought for us.” A lot of people had died in this house. Many from old age, or the problems that came from that—memory loss, physical problems that people couldn’t deal with in their homes. Some from injury. A fallen tree. Wolf attacks. Other monsters. Mako. But… Vincent had made it this far.

“He fought for us. We fight for him.” Claudia agreed, and Var remembered, abruptly, why he married this woman. The fire at the back of her eyes. The way she held her ground. That damned smile in the face of stupid odds.

“I’ll be up in a moment—”

“I’ll be waiting.” She darted back into the room, tossing dirty sheets into a basket. If he could make it this far… then… she would **_not_** fail him now. Not after all this.

***

Vincent was out cold when they brought him in, limp, and… too cold.

“He’s hypothermic.” Easy diagnosis. Expected, even. “Take him upstairs. The guest room with the fire burning.” It was, perhaps, excessive—but deserved.

“Did he really—“ Mr. Lockheart, too cold with anyone but his wife for anything but his full title to be used.

She cut him off. No time. “Maybe. Monsters or no, he’s been exposed to the elements too long. Vincent is tough, but this is… he shouldn’t have dealt with this. “ She ran upstairs, then paused. The boy was inside the room—when he had gotten there, or how much he had heard, she wasn’t sure. “Seph? Sorry—is it Seph or Sephiroth?”

The looked at her, unblinking. His eyes had… his eyes weren’t…. it didn’t matter. Not for now, anyway. 

“Seph, We’re going to do everything we can to help Vincent. But I need you to do—”

He flinched—rocked, more like, as if his whole body fought him. But he regained eye contact. “No.”

She took a deep breath. “Sephiroth, you’ll get in the way if he—”

He shuddered again, like a tree being felled. “ ** _No_**. I’m not leaving.”

She took another deep breath, crossed the floor to him. Looked into his eyes. “He may be hurt.”

“Yes.”

“Badly.”

“I know.”

“If you get in the way—if you make it harder to help him…”

“Then you’ll have me thrown out?” There was something off in Sephiroth’s too-even tone there—like he was amused. Admittedly… admittedly, after what she had seen him do to the odd monster in the mine… she wasn’t sure if they **_could_** remove him by force. But she was a healer, and she knew something most people didn’t really admit to themselves. People responded very, very well to confidence. He didn’t need her actual thoughts any more than a birthing mother needed a critique of her pushes. 

She met his eyes, gone cat in that moment—there seemed to be more to it than just light, they also changed other times—let him see the confidence she did not feel and watched him blink. “Yes. Not because you shouldn’t see him or I don’t want you to. Because I need to focus on helping him and if you get in the way or get upset, that will slow me down. If you’re upset, even if he’s unconscious, he could hear you, and that could make him think it’s worse than it is.” That could kill, if someone was on a ledge.

“I won’t make a sound. But I’m not leaving.” Sephiroth said, quiet. His fists were shaking and there was something strained around his eyes.

That would not be tolerated in a hospital. This wasn’t a hospital. She did not have the staff, or the personnel, or the equipment. She had mastered restore and purify materia. That was all the town had. And… it was also possible that his presence would help. She’d seen things take sharp turns after an injured man realized someone was watching who shouldn’t see them die. So she nodded. “Then stay. **_For now_**.”

The boy blinked like a cat would, too slowly, and she wasn’t sure what she thought of that. His hands were shaking and his shoulders were too stiff. But there was no time to think anyway. Rells and Mr. Lockhart brought the man up a moment later—she only nodded to them as Var shooed them out, heard Sephiroth hiss in a breath but true to his word, he made no other noise. She started to unbuckle the cape—couldn’t. A hard brown crust lay over most of it. She frowned. If that wasn’t dried blood, she was a chocobo. “Var, get me warm water and a washcloth.” Normally she’d just cut through it, but… the material was tough. Very tough. It might actually jostle the man more to get it off him that way.

How many fucking buckles and straps could a man have on one outfit?

Warm water eased enough blood off that the buckles worked easily—Var eased the man’s shoulders up and she pulled the cape away, then got to work on the shirt underneath. Couldn’t—it caught on his gauntlet and glove, though if that was due to more dried blood gumming up the works or . “Does that even come off? Is it—”

“It does.” Seph said quietly from his corner—Var had evidently been too focused to notice him, because he actually jumped sideways—she spared him a glance he didn’t see, looking at the kid. He hesitated, looking at them, then darted forward, quietly and calmly disassembling the gauntlet with a few twisting motions and some cracking noises that made her hair stand on end. She would have been worried, but—“He doesn’t take it off a lot, so he doesn’t worry about the noise it makes.” He offered her a wary look, gauging her reaction before darting back to his spot in the corner.

It looked unholy complicated. And underneath… oh, Shiva you **_bitch_**.

“It’s not frostbite. His arm always looked like that.” Seph said, still very quiet. She took another look—alright. Frostbite was rarely that even over a whole arm, and the hand itself… the flesh was hard for flesh, but not the kind of hard frostbite at that stage of blackness produced. Frostbite also didn’t give a man **_claws_**.

“How do you know what late-stage frostbite looks like?” Var asked. Seph only looked at him.

“Not important now. Seph, look at me. Is this any darker in color or paler or—” He had a hand that was…. That did not mean it was not **_also_** frostbitten. Just impossible to gauge correctly.

Seph looked, then reached out and ran a hand over it. “Color seems right, maybe a little paler. Only a little. Colder than it was before, but not so much more that I’d assume deep tissue damage.”

Alright, she’d assumed the child would be upset. Not **_upsetting_**. How did he… it didn’t matter. Not now anyway. Although this was also not what she had in mind when she thought he might be helpful.

“Alright. Seph, is there anything else that’s… not quite medically normal?”

Sephiroth paused, frowning. She went back to easing off the other glove and then went back to the shirt. “I… don’t know.”

“You don’t know, or you don’t know how to explain?” Var asked, then quickly added, “Either is fine, but we need to know which it is, for his sake.”

Seph paused, curling back into his corner, his eyes on her hands. “I don’t know if what I know would make him medically weird, and I don’t know how to explain it if it does.”

Claudia took another deep breath. Right. The basic rules then—air goes in and out, blood goes round and round. Any deviation from that is bad. Her husband eased the man’s shoulders up again so she could pull off the shirt, and—“Sweet Shiva!”

Seph shot her a disapproving glance, but she didn’t see it, a hand coming up to cover her mouth and eyes tracing the scars on her patient’s torso. The bruising was bad, very bad, and she would deal with that, but—

“Seph, do you know which scars are from… before? It could be important for figuring out blood loss. I guess the potion must have closed his injuries, which… good, but…”

“Some of these were **_not_** from combat,” Claudia whispered.

Var looked at her sharply, but her eyes were trained on Vincent.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen him without his shirt,” said Sephiroth, sounding not at all surprised and less horrified, his shaking fists easing in their motion as if this was somehow… normal. Or as if her horror soothed him. “But… these ones have indents where they had stiches, and those ones—they’re usually more pink right after healing right? Those are too straight to be natural. And those two look like they are **_under_** these… so probably just this one and this one.”

Claudia took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and when she opened them, there was focus in them again. “Right. I’m going to heal the bruising, and once he manages to keep some food down we should give him another potion. Var, I want every hot water bottle we have filled and packed around him.”

“Not the usual method for hypothermia,” Var said. 

“No, but I think it’s probably our best option here.”


	3. Honor vs. Guilt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An alternate version of Veld reading from the Princess Bride. Sephiroth poses a disturbing question of morality.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This could have taken place in the bit where Vincent lost his voice (or tried to, before Veld kicked the door in and poured tea down his throat). I decided against it for several reasons-- it felt a little too overt with Seph, and Veld... I don't think he's quite in this headspace. Yet. I liked his mention of Felicia's... English can't be right here, but literature classes. I also very much enjoyed Vincent threatening Veld with his eyes when he thought he was making a dirty joke in front of his kid. And realizing that Sephiroth could twist him around his fingers 
> 
> Let me know what you think!

“Buttercup would **_not_** have screamed.” Sephiroth interrupted, somewhat sulkily. “She may not be as smart as I want the heroes to be, but she is brave and honest and kind, and she would not have screamed. But the Swordsman and the Giant seem nicer than the Short Evil Mastermind.”

“It’s probably a metaphor.” Vincent could be very eloquent with his looks when he chose. He raised an eyebrow and gave Veld an extremely descriptive look. Veld snorted. “Not that kind of metaphor!”

**_Keep digging, Veld_** , Vincent’s eyes said. **_See where you end up._**

Sephiroth was looking between them, confused, and Vincent took a long, deliberately loud slurp of tea without breaking eye contact with Veld. “What?”

“Nothing important. Vincent was just going to say something silly.” Veld lied, and Vincent raised one eyebrow again. “Sometimes stories say things indirectly—so if a person is big, maybe the story means powerful, or if they are small, sometimes it means weak.”

Vincent cocked his head to one side.

“Felicia is in advanced English classes. On good days, I get to help her with homework.” Veld murmured, fiddling with the dust jacket.

Felicia. The daughter Vincent hadn’t gotten to meet. Vincent, nodded, looked away and drank more tea. His throat felt a lot better, but when he opened his mouth Veld scowled and Sephiroth looked concerned. Why did no one tell him that children could accidentally hone innocent looks into _weapons_?

Sephiroth giggled and leaned back against Vincent, his head resting on Vincent’s chest, rising and falling with the man’s breathing. “Then, the Mastermind is weak, but the Giant is powerful? That doesn’t make sense. The Mastermind is smarter, and he commands the Giant and the Swordsman. They don’t seem very smart.” He frowned. “The Swordsman and the Giant don’t seem very smart, I mean, but I like them. Is that bad?”

Veld graciously asked the question on Vincent’s face. “Why would that be bad?”

“Because they’re bad, because they kidnapped the Princess, but also because they are Stupid. Hojo says… Hojo says…” the boy’s face scrunched up in thought. Vincent kept his body relaxed by sheer force of will, but he had to shut his eyes. And Veld frowned.

“Go on?”

“Hojo says Stupid People deserve what they get, because if they were supposed to live, they’d be smart enough to facili-facili—”

“Facilitate?” Vincent prompted, gently. The tea was helping, he sounded mostly normal. Sephiroth still frowned at him.

“Yeah. They should be able to facilitate their own existence.”

“That’s one, mister.” Veld said to Vincent, mostly because he was trying to process what he had just heard, and staring openmouthed at the child wouldn’t help with that. But also because he didn’t want Vincent to talk. After a deep breath, he managed “Hojo isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”

“Honor.” Vincent said, raising an eyebrow. From in his lap, a small and pale hand reached up and planted itself firmly over his mouth.

“Yes, I’ll elaborate, but you shut up,” Veld agreed, siding with the appendage. “Sephiroth, if you are stronger than someone, does that give you the right to hit them?”

“Hojo thinks so, but he doesn’t like it when stronger things hit him. And Vincent doesn’t. Vincent’s stronger than everybody and he lets Mrs. Lockhart pretend to swing at him because she thinks it’s funny and it reminds people that he won’t hit them.”

Veld gave him a look over that one, but Vincent sighed mournfully and mimed a locking motion at his lips, then tossing the key over one shoulder. “Right. Vincent protects people. Sometimes a little too much, but that’s another discussion. Do you know why?”

Sephiroth shook his head.

Veld opened his mouth, and shut it again. He had a most bizarre and distressing look on his face—Vincent recognized it and frowned. “Because,” he finally said, “it is important to be strong, if you can be. But not so you can lord it over other people. So that you can protect them.”

Seph cocked his head and looked up at Vincent, for confirmation. Vincent nodded with a little more feeling than Veld had managed.

“Being smart is the same. If you can be smart, then you should be, because smart people help. But it’s not something that should give you power—it is an honor, and a responsibility.” Veld was borrowing this speech almost verbatim from their mentor’s mentor, a man who had died not long after they joined. The Turks had not been held to such a high standard in a long time—and it showed in Veld’s voice—his eyes shifting with guilt and his voice going soft and sad.


	4. Fallen Feathers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An alternate angle for the interaction between Vincent, Seph, the Nibel Trio and a revealed secret.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not a ton here, sorry. I started writing it this way but I thought the other way worked better. In case you want the view, here is this way also.

Vincent took a deep breath and rubbed Seph’s back quietly, keeping the others… his friends… in the periphery of his vision in case they decided to react… badly. Sometimes people did that when you surprised them with things they didn’t understand…. But sometimes they talked themselves down too, so he didn’t say anything, only murmuring to the boy when he started to edge closer to hyperventilating. “Shhhhh, Seph. It’s alright.”  
“No it isn’t!” Seph whispered back, too quietly for them to hear.   
“Shhhhh.” He told him, and looked back up. He wasn’t sure what he expected—this was… this was a bad scenario. One he would have pardoned them all from participating in had he known, when he set out that morning, how it would end. “Shhhhhhh.” He breathed into the boy’s hair, stirring it lightly.   
He did not expect Mr. Lockhart to be the first to move, eyes shutting and a hand lifting to half rub, half claw at his eyes. “Fucking… Shinra.” Vincent blinked, and the man spared him only a glance before unpinning—he had a scarf with an ornate decorative pin in it, and undid it, moving forward to stand half facing him, half facing Seph—he addressed the boy. “Hey—lean backwards for a moment, would you? If I pin the cloak down, it won’t do that again, okay?”   
His tone was awkward, but heartfelt. Vincent nodded when Seph looked up at him in confusion, and the man twisted the cape a little—tightening it so it didn’t have room to move with a spare breeze, and fastening it with the pin. “Return that, when you’re in town next, alright?”  
“Yes. Thank you.” Vincent told him, quietly.   
Fucking Shinra.   
The man met his eyes over the boy’s head while he stepped back—less threatening than most.


End file.
